What is a Design Challenge?

A Design Challenge empowers students to integrate prior knowledge, new discoveries, and the Engineering Design Process (EDP) to design, test, and improve a solution. Resources to learn about the EDP can be found here.

2025 Student Design Challenge

Our overarching topic is HEALTH. In 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes a dedicated and stand-alone goal on health, SDG 3, calling to "ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages".

This year’s challenge invites students to consider what types of innovations or new designs might help ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages.  How they can improve their community and environment by examining current trends and/or practices in their area. Students have choice about how they approach the topic so they may best approach the needs of their communities and lives.

Students might consider questions such as these: 

• How can a change of habit help promote a healthier lifestyle?
• What methods or procedures are currently used to promote good hygiene? 
• What data could be gathered, and how could that data be used to better understand the science behind those habits?
• What product or service could help solve large-scale health concerns?

For each question, students are encouraged to:  

• Identify the problem
• Define the target audience who will benefit from the solution 
• Prototype your solution in the most appropriate media for your project
• Discuss how the solution solves the problem for the target audience 
• Identify one career that is related to implementing the solution